Related papers: Hysteresis in the cell response to time-dependent …
Understanding the rolling and adhesion behavior of a cell on the vascular surface under viscous shear flow is important to better understand many biological processes. One of the important examples is the adhesion of the leukocytes onto…
Cell crawling requires the generation of intracellular forces by the cytoskeleton and their transmission to an extracellular substrate through specific adhesion molecules. Crawling cells show many features of excitable systems, such as…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…
We construct a homogeneous, nonlinear elastic constitutive law, that models aspects of the mechanical behavior of inhomogeneous fibrin networks. Fibers in such networks buckle when in compression. We model this as a loss of stiffness in…
Coordinated and cooperative motion of cells is essential for embryonic development, tissue morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer invasion. A predictive understanding of the emergent mechanical behaviors in collective cell motion is…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
The development of traction-force microscopy, in the past two decades, has created the unprecedented opportunity of performing direct mechanical measurements on living cells as they adhere or crawl on uniform or micro-patterned substrates.…
We present a minimal continuum model of strongly adhering cells as active contractile isotropic media and use the model to study the effect of the geometry of the adhesion patch in controlling the spatial distribution of traction and…
Many cell types exhibit oscillatory activity, such as repetitive action potential firing due to the Hodgkin-Huxley dynamics of ion channels in the cell membrane or reveal intracellular inositol triphosphate (IP$_3$) mediated calcium…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Insects, pick-and-place manufacturing, engineered adhesives, and soft robots employ soft materials to stick to surfaces even in the presence of roughness. Experiments show that the force required for making contact is lower than for…
We present a model for the actin contractile ring of adherent animal cells. The model suggests that the actin concentration within the ring and consequently the power that the ring exerts both increase during contraction. We demonstrate the…
The study of the interactions of living adherent cells with mechanically stable (visco)elastic materials enables understanding and exploiting physiological phenomena mediated by cell-extracellular communication. However, insight on the…
Cells exert traction forces on compliant substrates and can induce surface instabilities that appear as characteristic wrinkling patterns. Here, we develop a mechanical description of cell-induced wrinkling on soft substrates using a thin…
Adhesion hysteresis can be caused by elastic instabilities that are triggered by surface roughness or chemical heterogeneity. However, the role of these instabilities in adhesion hysteresis remains poorly understood because we lack…
Myxococcus xanthus is a model organism for studying bacterial social behaviors due to its ability to form complex multi-cellular structures. Knowledge of M. xanthus surface gliding motility and the mechanisms that coordinate it are…
Cells move differently on substrates with different elasticities. In particular, the persistence time of their motion is higher on stiffer substrates. We show that this behavior will result in a net transport of cells directed up a…
The reaction-diffusion models have been extensively applied to explain the mechanism of pattern formations in early embryogenesis based on geometrically confined microtissues consisting of human pluripotent stem cells. Recently, mechanical…
Cells sense the geometry and stiffness of their adhesive environment by active contractility. For strong adhesion to flat substrates, two-dimensional contractile network models can be used to understand how force is distributed throughout…